`CHICAGO ON STAGE': SHOWCASE OF STARS, THEATER

Others, no less familiar, are more famous for their films: John Malkovich, John Cusack, Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna. All once worked for peanuts, in sometimes grubby, cramped, all-but-unknown Chicago theaters. They and their nearly countless colleagues have made Chicago, in the last two decades, the most exciting theatrical town anywhere.

All the while, that stage work has been seen only by a small contingent of theater enthusiasts whose influence broadens with every year. Chicago theater now is established as a pool teeming with diverse talent, ideas, provocative styles and, most of all, bright new stars.

Print media around town have praised all this from the beginning. Now, thanks to an enterprising producer at WTTW-Ch. 11 and the indefatigable energies (and fund-raising) of the Joseph Jefferson Committee-a local organization that annually bestows awards (affectionately known as "Jeffs") on Chicago theaters-the city's theater story is about to get a wide-and surprisingly-deep airing on TV.

"Chicago On Stage," a one-hour documentary (9 p.m. Wednesday, WTTW-Ch. 11), is both a breezy history lesson and a survey of what Chicago theaters have produced. In it, producer Geoffrey Baer also checks into some of the thornier issues confronting theater here-the difficulties even the most talented artists confront in trying to make a living, for instance. And he jams together, in one solid hour, a sweeping representation of the remarkable people who have made all this happen.

Just to rattle off names on the list is an indication of how much talent the theater community here inspired or still commands. There's Robert Falls, one of the country's leading stage directors, whose style and vision have reinvented the Goodman Theatre and supported the work of some of the world's most adventurous artists.

Besides the list of celebrities who made the bigtime after spending time in Chicago theater, there are the memories.

"The first thing that struck me in Los Angeles," Metcalf notes, "is that they really respect actors who come out of Chicago."

Mantegna recalls his early years in New York, when Chicago actors, he says, were expected to show up with straws of hay in their mouths.

Almost reverential expectations meet Big Shoulder graduates now. The famed Chicago style of acting-about as diverse, in the end, as the participants who deliver it-is said by Metcalf to be "energetic, crazy, wild, threatening, lose," and after a long pause, "ugly."

"We were just actors," Sinise puts it, "who wanted to act." The documentary traces the long history of that urge, beginning with the drier, touring era of the `40s-and critic Claudia Cassidy's championing of "The Glass Menagerie"-through the Second City years of the `50s and beyond, which gave the nation improvisational comedy.

Then came a group out of Madison, Wis., where, among other innovations, they staged a version of "Peter Pan" with nudity. Stuart Gordon, lead guru of the Organic Theatre and eventually a successful Hollywood director and screenwriter ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" was his idea), can't remember now how they got nudity into the children's classic.

But everybody, including longtime enthusiast Michael Nussbaum, remembers Mamet's growth with the Organic and that troupe's longstanding contribution to original work, done in part, Mamet says, because the theater didn't have money to pay for rights. (Mamet also details how in lean years he stayed alive by playing poker.) "To this day," says playwright Douglas Post, "if I'm writing a play, I ask, `If this were being done by the Organic, what would it be like?"'

From the Organic, the special moves to the development of Steppenwolf in the mid-'70s, through the explosion of other groups inspired in part by them ever since, and on to some of the newer groups now struggling on the city's theatrical Petri dish.

The Dogs, a new, young, all-male performance troupe, and Lookingglass Theatre explain how they evolve their highly physical, highly unique theater. Zimmerman, who staged "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci," eloquently details the visceral thrill involved in bringing ancient texts to life. And Catherine Evans and Doug Spinuzza of Live Bait Theater explain painfully why they moved to L.A.

Producer Baer was approached by the Jeff Committee two years ago before its 25th anniversary. The special thus took two years in the making, one reason for its thoroughness. Baer himself studied theater and often still teaches it, in addition to his chores at WTTW.

"I didn't want it to be this inside thing, but I didn't want it to be glossy, fluffy and insubstantial, either," he says. The bottom line is the difference in breadth even a small television audience brings:

"If we only get a 3 rating, it will reach more people in one night than some of the larger theaters reach in an entire season. It's a chance to spread the word."